Welcome back to the Retention Edge newsletter.

As always, I’m bringing you the latest in marketing, retention and ecommerce - keeping you up to speed with the latest movements, news and content from the industry, to help you stay ahead of the curve.

Highlights from this week:

Let’s dive in now.

TikTok Shop is building an in-house managed-services arm that competes with its own agencies

TikTok is piloting a US program, set to start in August, in which it takes over almost every part of a seller's Shop business: running ads through its GMV Max tool, optimizing listings, hiring creators, and producing content including hundreds of AI-generated videos, according to documentation viewed by Business Insider.

Sellers stay responsible for getting products listed and sending samples to influencers, but little else, and enrollment costs a $10,000 flat fee plus a 10% to 20% commission per sale depending on product category.

The move puts TikTok in direct competition with the agency partners it leaned on to build the channel since 2023. For brands selling on TikTok Shop, it is a real trade to weigh: hand the platform near-total control of your storefront, or keep the margin and independence that come with running it yourself.

Amazon requires sellers to label AI-generated people in listings after a New York law

Amazon told third-party sellers this week they must tag any product images or A+ content containing photorealistic AI-generated people with specific metadata before uploading, in response to a New York law that took effect last month requiring disclosure when synthetic performers replace human actors in ads.

Amazon says it will add a consumer-facing indicator on affected listings, though it has not said exactly when. The rule doesn’t cover real people altered with AI, or characters from TV, games, and movies.

Possibly one of the first steps in what could be a wave of regulations over how marketers use AI to sell products online. If you’re doing AI-generated UGC ads, I’d be wary.

Shopify overhauls Collections with multi-source rules and variant targeting

Shopify rebuilt its Collections tool so a single collection can now blend automatic conditions, hand-picked products, exclusions, and even other collections, ending the old either-or trade-off between full automation and manual curation.

Collections can now target individual variants rather than whole products, a "Valentine's Red Edit" of just the red and pink variants, for example, pull sources from apps, and be reused as building blocks across the online store, POS, and Shop, and Sidekick can set up the tagging and automation from a plain-language prompt.

Existing collections carry over automatically, but if you run custom or third-party apps that touch collections, developers need to update to API version 2026-07 to support the new capabilities.

Google shipped a Search Console switch to opt out of AI Overviews

Google has published Search Console documentation for a control, now rolling out to a subset of site owners, that lets a site exclude its content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover.

The switch works at the domain level, takes effect within one to two days, and, notably, does not change conventional search ranking, nor does it stop model training, which still runs through the separate Google-Extended token.

Retailers hold the AI-commerce advantage over ChatGPT as agentic shopping stalls

EMARKETER now expects AI platform-driven sales to reach $19.74 billion this year, roughly 4% below its December 2025 projection, and it lowered the outlook for 2027 and beyond.

The pattern behind this is that shoppers are comfortable using AI for research and discovery, but still complete purchases on retailer sites and apps, and there’s still not a lot of interest in handing checkout to an agent.

Michaels launches Ask Mike, an AI shopping assistant built on Google's Gemini

Michaels put its Ask Mike assistant live on its website this week, built with Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise and, per Google Cloud, taken from concept to production in six weeks.

The tool gives personalized recommendations and creative guidance from a shopper's description, and Michaels says it has fueled nearly 75,000 conversations since a soft launch in May, with prompts like planning a child's birthday party or finding fabric for DIY curtains.

Michaels joins Ulta and Macy's on Gemini and Lowe's on OpenAI, as major retailers leaning into conversational commerce and AI-driven storefronts; a model that may soon be the norm in ecommerce.

Stanley 1913 uses AI behind the scenes but keeps it out of consumer-facing creative

Stanley 1913 says AI is fair game for ideation, concept, and personalization, but chief brand officer Kate Ridley told Digiday it has not used AI for any consumer-facing creative and will not for the foreseeable future.

The reasoning is brand risk: with 79% unaided awareness in North America, per the company, Stanley argues its authenticity is worth protecting, and it has invested in in-house creative teams, an internal photo studio, and a bigger creator budget built on seeding rather than pay-to-play.

Curie rebuilt its brand around how people shop 4,300 Walmart stores

Seven-year-old natural deodorant brand Curie is overhauling its packaging, DTC site, logo, and messaging, and founder and CEO Sarah Moret told Adweek the refresh is grounded in insights from the 4,300 Walmart stores where it has sold since 2023.

It’s the first time Curie has used an outside agency, Gander, after years of handling branding in-house.

The takeaway for DTC brands moving into big-box retail: the shelf is a different buying environment than a product page, and a brand system tuned for one may need rebuilding for the other.

How Bookshop.org rebuilt itself after the pandemic tailwind faded

Bookshop.org grew from zero to $60 million in revenue in its first eight months after launching in January 2020, riding a pandemic tailwind as shuttered bookstores had nowhere else to sell.

But when shoppers returned to physical stores in 2022, the business shrank about 40%, forcing a rebuild. Founder Andy Hunter's team re-engineered the site, moving the backend to Go and the frontend to Next.js, swapping in Meilisearch for search, replacing the old checkout with a fast single-page flow, then A/B testing individual elements and building segmented email flows for new, returning, and inactive customers.

The company’s sales grew about 55% in 2025, and Hunter expects revenue to reach $80 million this year, up from $68 million.

TikTok Shop begins piloting alcohol sales in the UK with three-stage age checks

TikTok Shop has started trialing alcohol sales in the UK with a small group of approved, licensed retailers, reportedly including Johnnie Walker Black Label, AU Vodka, and Estrella Damm's Inedit.

Buyers face age verification when setting up an account, again at purchase, and a third time on delivery, when drivers must check government-issued ID.

The pilot is a test case for whether social commerce can handle age-restricted categories at scale, and any brand in a regulated category watching TikTok Shop should note both the friction added and the compliance bar being set.

Kroger's new CEO, a Walmart veteran, is betting on speed, execution, and cost discipline

Greg Foran, who ran Walmart US before leading Air New Zealand and joined Kroger in February, is steering the grocer toward fundamentals: cutting costs he says are growing faster than sales, closing the gap between best and worst stores, and financing a roughly $1.7 billion Giant Eagle acquisition with cash rather than chasing another mega-merger.

He’s also leaning into retail media as a margin driver, noting that 95% of Kroger transactions are tied to loyalty accounts, which lets the company measure actual purchase behavior for advertisers.

For brands, the loyalty-data point is the one to watch: Kroger is positioning first-party purchase data as its competitive edge in ad monetization.

Google Ads moves its "missed growth" estimates into the main Recommendations tab

Google has moved its Missed Growth Opportunity estimates out of Ads Labs and into the main Recommendations tab as a beta for eligible advertisers, showing the clicks, conversions, and conversion value a campaign supposedly left unclaimed and breaking out whether a capped budget or a low bid caused the gap.

Worth keeping in mind: these are modeled projections, and Google is the party estimating what more spend in its own auction would have returned, so any advertiser raising budgets off them is working from an unverifiable forecast. Treat the numbers as a prompt to test, not a promise.

How to build a brand presence on Reddit in 2026

A foundational Reddit playbook makes the rounds: sign up for the free Reddit Pro for analytics and keyword tracking, study Reddit Trends and the Ads Inspiration library to learn tone, spend real time understanding how each subreddit engages before posting, then build organic and paid approaches and monitor performance.

The urgency comes from Reddit's growing weight in both Google results and AI chatbot answers, which has turned its crowd-voted discussions into a genuine product-discovery surface. For operators, getting fluent in Reddit's norms now is partly an AI-visibility play, not just a community one.

What happens to your Shopify apps and integrations when you build a mobile app

Most of the time, when you launch an app for your Shopify brand, you end up losing a lot of the features that make your site great.

Shopify mobile app builders spin up a separate storefront on its own codebase, relying on pre-built integrations for all your Shopify apps, marketing & analytics tools and other third-party software - which invariably doesn’t cover your entire tech stack.

This article breaks down the problem clearly, along with how MobiLoud’s approach to app building works differently - and makes sure that every part of your tech stack (even custom-built features) carries over perfectly to your mobile app.

More brands are pushing founders in front of the camera

Founder-led social is becoming a core growth channel, and the pressure is coming from more than reach.

A Constant Contact survey of over 5,000 people found nearly three in four small business owners now adopt a "creator" identity, with 47% personally managing their company's social presence, and HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing Report found nearly half of brand marketers rank short-form video as their highest-ROI visual format.

Canada's Sleep Country to acquire Sleep Number out of bankruptcy for over $700M

Sleep Country, Canada's largest mattress retailer, won court approval to acquire US maker and retailer Sleep Number for $702 million, including nearly $530 million in cash, with the deal expected to close in about 10 days.

Sleep Number filed for bankruptcy last month with a Sleep Country agreement already in hand, and the Canadian company's original offer was around $415 million. An investment earlier this year from Travis Kelce, who became a top shareholder with under 5% ownership and signed on to appear in Sleep Number ads for three years, was not enough to keep the brand out of bankruptcy as sales fell and market share shrank.

The combined company, folding Sleep Number's 570-plus US stores into Sleep Country's 300-plus, becomes the second-largest sleep retailer in the world after Somnigroup. For operators, it is a reminder that celebrity equity and fresh inventory can’t fix broken unit economics, and that distressed-asset consolidation keeps reshaping the mattress category.

Operators are starting to describe retention and media buying as agent management, not people management.

Cody Plofker, back in the retention weeds after stepping out of the CEO seat, floated the near-term shape of the job: one capable senior person running an entire retention program by managing agents instead of a team of people.

The thought that’s getting shared more and more often is that the org chart under a senior operator may soon be software, and the skill that matters becomes briefing and supervising agents rather than doing the task yourself.

The best use of AI in content right now is reading your returns, not writing your posts.

Jimmy Kim made the case that brands struggle with content because they start from the product instead of the customer's problem.

His fix is to feed AI the support tickets from customers who bought and then returned, and ask it to find the most common misunderstanding: what buyers expected the product to do versus what it actually did.

Paid strategists are reframing creative as something the algorithm judges before any customer sees it.

Rok Hladnik argued that every ad is now AI-first: before a human ever sees your creative, landing page, or offer, the algorithm has already judged it and set your CPMs, audience pockets, and early delivery.

So the question shifts from "will a customer like this?" to also "will the algorithm know what to do with this?"

In a separate post he called out the testing theater that follows from getting this wrong: brands launching one creator, one video, inside an existing campaign with no dedicated budget, then killing it in seven days and blaming the creative when the setup was designed to produce an inconclusive result.

The Retention Edge newsletter is brought to you by MobiLoud: the best mobile app builder for Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and every other platform that powers serious brands.

Unlike other app builders, which squeeze your brand into strict templates and struggle to replicate everything from your website in your app, MobiLoud lets you build custom mobile apps, powered by your existing tech stack.

Everything that works on your site works in your app. And you get to maintain two unique channels (website and app) from one place

It’s the engine behind the VIP channels from brands like John Varvatos, Jack & Jones, Tadashi Shoji and many more.

If you want to see what your site could look like as an app, get in touch and book a free preview and consultation; no commitment, no stress.

That’s all for this week.

I’ll be back in touch soon, keeping an eye on what’s happening in the ecommerce and retail world, so you can keep yours on growing your business.

Until then,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: shoot me a DM on LinkedIn if you’re interested in what a custom mobile app could do for your brand.